The Lowering Days
Gregory Brown’s debut novel The Lowering Days (2021) weaves together several families' stories who make their home along the Penobscot River just as the river collects many tributaries before it dumps into the sea. Two families, both alike in dignity, make their homes in the rural woods along the Penobscot near its mouth. One, the Creels, with Lyman and Grace at its head rely on the bounty of the sea. Lyman is a decorated war vet and a lobster man. Grace, like her name, walks a gracious path through marriage and maternity even in the face of unspeakable tragedy. The other, the Ames, is the result of a love union between boat-builder and activist journalist, Arnoux and Falon respectively. These neighbors have a deep and tenuous history, like the main branches of a river where it flows into the sea; The Lowering Days follows these many streams upriver to their sources.
Told in first-person by David Almerin Ames, now a doctor in his adulthood, weaves the stories of his childhood, the people, places and tragedies with which he came of age. As he tells the reader, his project is “to freely survey the lives I grew up among, moving from one household into another much like the river that surrounded us” (5-6). His parents, Arnoux and Falon, his maternal uncle Reggie, his childhood best friend, Wren, the Black Vietnam deserter, Roman, the Native environmental activist teen, Molly with her father, Adam, and Moses who connects the Native world with that of David’s family. Needless to say, this novel abounds with a diverse cast of characters, just like any rural area, particularly along the coast of Maine.
There are many traumas and tragedies that shade Brown’s characters in The Lowering Days. Haunted by a tragedy on a cliff where three teens drank and flirted, and one, a Native, ended up dead. Haunted by the Vietnam War that ravaged the young adulthood of these men, now fathers and husbands. Haunted by a ghost tree and the blended traditions that become something unique to this place, special in their magic and their amalgamated nature. Haunted by the loss of the land and the lumber industry’s destruction on the native forest. The story that emerges is a blending of all their experiences and traumas. One character explains, the story is “all of ours. It’s been around these woods for a long time. It was here twenty-five years ago [. . .] and it’ll be here twenty-five years from now, when you [. . .] or your children or someone else’s children are up here” (156). The Lowering of Days highlights the shared experience across identity and the way that a place produces an amalgamated tradition of its own, shared by all its residents.
Brown eloquently follows the many streams of this story as they all flow into one another and meet at the sea. This is a moving debut novel. One that transports its reader to coastal Maine all the way up to Canada and highlights the diversity of experiences and traditions that inhabit that unique region. The Lowering of Days abounds in powerful imagery and storytelling, both of which remain with the reader long after she has finished the final lines.
Bibliography:
Brown, Gregory. The Lowering Days. Harpers Perennial: 2021
A Few Great Passages:
“Certain cultures believe a song or a chant voiced in one place can be heard in another place many miles away. Passamaquoddy people talk of motewolon, people with extraordinary spiritual powers who can hear for great distances. All these years later I am still convinced my parents carried some similar summoning magic. And while I don’t have the language for such a thing, I know only this: love should always be able to call love back” (5).
“[Y]ou can’t be human and be just one thing” (36).
“Some places are like portals to eternity [. . .] You stand in them and look around, and you feel how long and unending the world is. You become a part of something beyond time” (77).
“While my uncle wasn’t some doomsday prophet wildly predicting the end times, thee ending of things did fascinate him. He didn’t believe the end of a life could be as simple and cruel as Christianity claimed, where one’s final experience in the physical world was one of judgement—death, followed by an odd, divine verdict: heaven for you, hell for you. Instead he was convinced every ending was followed by some kind of reunion with the divine, whether that was a simple return to the earth or a wild celestial journey to some other place of existence ruled by a grand, theistic being we’d yet to prove existed. In his eyes the end of the world, or the end of living, as we understood it, was not a terrifying premise at all but the first tilt toward reunion” (77-78).
“I think our ancestors give us gifts we’re supposed to keep safe. Sometimes it’s a trait or a tradition passed down by a parent. Sometimes it’s really clear. Arnoux builds boats like no one can believe. You have Arnoux’s hands. It doesn’t matter what you do with them. Maybe you’ll bake bread, lay bricks, be a doctor and save lives. The point of the gift is to hang on to it for future generations. I started thinking maybe those kids needed someone to leave something with” (130).
“A great sorrow for all the things I had never experienced in my life filled me then. At the edge of this pond, I felt as small and lonely as a young child. People never talk about the loneliness of childhood” (246).
“[W]e can only account for about seven percent of all the matter in the known universe. What this means is that you’d be a fool to believe that what you can see, feel, and comprehend is more important than what you cannot. Probability would dictate that what exists in the other ninety-three percent of matter may hold great importance. So the perplexing truth is that there are quite possibly other worlds playing out that we can’t see or even begin to comprehend. It’s not just that our fathers might be living different lives in some different dimension, but that different concepts of father and of friend and of enemy may exist, or not exist at all” (266).
